The road towards de-googlization
Up until recently I thought people who were anti Google and other tech giants were a fringe "off the grid" type of people. But a very important book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff opened my eyes to the real purpose of these giant corporations.
The thing is, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Surveillance capitalism relies on secrecy, making certain that we can’t understand the extent of its reach. As Zuboff writes, the important questions are: Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?
Zuboff gives a detailed answer to these questions through a chilling account of the birth and evolution of surveillance capitalism. Once your eyes are opened, you can’t unsee it. As it turns out, Google is at the root of surveillance capitalism as we know it (or rather don’t really know it) today. Zuboff dissects this new economical order and explains how it started with advertising in Google Search and very quickly turned into predicting our behavior. This means we can be manipulated and turned into a herd, moving without friction to the tune of their choice. In an article for the Guardian, Zuboff describes the age of surveillance capitalism as "a titanic struggle between capital and each one of us. It is a direct intervention into free will, an assault on human autonomy."
The most important idea is that it’s not so much the content of what we do or say that surveillance capitalists care about, it’s actually how we say it or the fact that we say it at all. Our unconscious body language and micro expressions for example, tell them much more about who we really are than the content of what we’re saying. They need this metadata to make their algorithm understand and predict human behavior and emotions. So it’s actually impossible to have “nothing to hide” because it’s about human nature and the very core of our being and individuality, not about the angry email you wrote to your ex.
The extent to which surveillance capitalists have inserted themselves in our lives is gigantic. Everything we do, say, see and hear, is mined. They rely on us becoming numb and overwhelmed, creating a feeling that we’re powerless. By making us pay little or no money for their apps, surveillance capitalists hooked us into their ecosystems. We are not the product but rather the resource they mine to create their product (behavior prediction and modification) that they sell to their actual customers (businesses). This goes much beyond simply showing us targeted advertising. In this video, Zuboff explains how surveillance capitalism was used to suppress Black votes in the US. Google and other tech giants have the ability to make us do or think things we would not have otherwise and to make us physically go to places (through Pokemon Go for example).
It’s important to note that surveillance capitalism is not tech. Tech can and should be good. If the answer to "who knows" and "who decides" is me then I am being respected and served. Transparency and consent are the keys here. Technology is just a vessel for surveillance capitalists and the problem is the way they use technology not technology itself.
Reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism helped me understand how we got here and made me want to take action. Significant change can only happen at the systemic level with tight regulations. But it is liberating to remove ourselves from their grasp. Being autistic, I have great strengths in rapidity and scale of action (yay for hyperfocus). I hadn’t even finished the book when I made the decision to de-googlize myself, i.e get rid of all Google products I was using, or at least as many as I could. My sister joined me in this endeavour and I was so happy to get her immediate buy in and support on this radical change.
Other companies like Facebook and Microsoft are also huge believers in the surveillance capitalistic model but I was not using their products to the extent of Google’s. Google was really the one that used my entire life as raw material for their actual product: behavior predictions and manipulation.
The last thing I will note before we get into the detail of my chosen alternatives, is that most of these apps are paid ones. There are many different options, some free and some paid, and I don’t mind paying for great products when they respect my privacy and offer valuable services. Google has also started to make more and more of its products paid, like Google Drive, Photos and Youtube (which has been aggressively showing millions of ads to bully people into paying a premium subscription). Now that many of us have been hooked, they dare ask for money on top of the life and human experience they steal from us so they can better control it. But we can reclaim our privacy and it’s easier than we think.
Here is the new suite of tools I now use everyday, I will go over each one and explain why I personally made these choices. My sister and I used a Todoist board to keep track of our research, testing and migration. We created a free template you can use to get started, that contains lists of alternatives for each app.
Google Search --> DuckDuckGo
Google Chrome --> Mozilla Firefox
YouTube --> Newpipe on Android
Google Drive --> Icedrive
Gmail + Google Calendar --> Fastmail
Google Keep --> Standard Notes
Google Docs --> Standard Notes/Cryptpad
Google Photos --> Stingle Photos
Google Maps --> Openstreetmap
Google Authenticator --> Lastpass Authenticator
Google Messages --> Signal (including sms)
Google Domains --> Namecheap
Google Fitbit --> Traditional watch ⌚
Search engine
The Google Search engine is at the heart of its data gathering. As explained here, “When you enter a search term, Google associates it with personal identifiers and it becomes part of your search history and online profile”, adding it to the mountain of data it collects on us through all the other apps. This change was the easiest one, and I chose DuckDuckGo, a very private alternative that does not track you.
Browser
Google Chrome is the only browser that tracks its users to such an extent. There are many, many articles on what Google uses its browser for, and it’s not pretty. This recent court case also illustrates a lot of what I learned in Zuboff’s book about the double standard Google and other surveillance capitalism use to communicate in order to hide the appalling extent of their shadiness. Zuboff calls it the shadow text, the hidden part of the iceberg we can’t even imagine. I replaced Google Chrome with Mozilla Firefox and never looked back.
Video platform
The toxicity of YouTube is very much common knowledge now so beyond the usual means of gathering all our (meta)data, Google has made a platform that centers and enables conspiracy theories and nazis. It’s pretty hard today to completely stop accessing its content but there are ways to go around it, as explained in this article. Since I have an Android phone, I’m able to use a great app called NewPipe, which Google is not allowing on its Playstore since it does not want us to stray away from the herd. With NewPipe, you can bypass Youtube’s toxic algorithm and watch its videos without ads.
Drive
Google Drive “actively scans and analyses everything that’s uploaded”(source), which then feeds into the beast turning us into a human behavior farm. I researched and tested many alternatives and have landed on Icedrive, which I find particularly well done. It’s very fast and has a great interface. It displays previews of pdfs, word documents and more. The price is also really affordable and you can get a lifetime subscription for a great storage to price ratio. The product is pretty recent so they are many cool features coming. It also has an encrypted drive section you can use. I really find it a pleasure to use every day and this is one of the products I am really glad I switched to because it has made my experience better, on top of getting me out from under Google’s thumb.
Email and Calendar
Gmail is its own particular flavor of toxic, the most recent articles show the horrendous amount of data it collects on us. Google robots scans and reads all our emails, using it all to know what we buy and do. There are many great alternatives to Gmail, with different price ranges and privacy levels. The most famous one is Proton mail, which is probably the top notch in terms of privacy since it’s hosted in Switzerland and encrypts all your emails. The end round for me was between Proton mail and Fastmail, and I chose the latter because I personally didn’t want the risk of losing access to my emails, and for price reasons since my sister and I had between 5 and 7 Gb of emails. Because Proton encrypts your emails, if you lose your password you lose access to all your emails, with no backup recovery solution. This is the case with every service that encrypts content, but some have a phrase or other mechanisms of recovery in case you lose your password. The calendar included with Fastmail was also perfect for our needs, and is integrated into the Fastmail app. Migrating all my 450+ accounts to the new email was very time consuming, even though it allowed me to close unused accounts and update all passwords. To make it easier on myself in the future, I created an email using my own domain so I won’t be dependent on any email provider. This will allow me to seamlessly change email providers should I ever want to.
Notes
I replaced Google Keep with Standard Notes. The free version of Standard Notes allows you to take basic notes, but with the premium version you can do much much more. Standard Notes is also fully encrypted, so you need to be careful about not losing your password, but the premium subscription allows several ways to backup your content.
Documents
To replace Google Docs, I purchased a 5 year subscription to Standard Notes so I had the closest thing to a lifetime subscription, and could set it and forget it. This gives me access to many different extensions, that include editors from bold text to spreadsheets and code as well as image storage capabilities. It integrates with the Webdav protocol, which Icedrive offers, so I can add images to my notes and they’re saved in Icedrive. I use Standard Notes for almost everything I used Google Docs for. I have documents that are just for myself and some that I share in read only mode (the Listed extension allows private and public sharing). For the few documents I need to edit at the same time as someone else, I use Cryptpad, that offers a suite of online documents with text, spreadsheet, presentation and more. All the documents are encrypted and can be edited by multiple people at the same time.
Photos
Our photos are a gold mine for Google. “They use your personal photos to scan your face, scan your friends and loved ones, and track your location – even if you’ve hidden it” (source). It also scans the content of all our pictures so if you have Nike trainers it will use that information to target you. I tried a lot of different apps to replace Google Photos and most of them were not equivalent, Flickr was very social networky, and Smugmug was really geared towards professional photographers and selling your pictures. And then I found out about a very recent app called Stingle Photos and I had finally found the perfect replacement. Stingle is still relatively unknown but I’m betting it won’t be for long. It offers a super fast Android app that backs up your pictures to a cloud while fully encrypting them. They have a recovery feature that gives you a backup phrase that you should safely store. It allows you to recover your account if you ever lose your password. The developers are hard at work right now to finish a desktop app that will allow you to import photos from Google more easily and they’re also working on an iOS app. Just like Icedrive, the fact that this awesome app is very recent means it will get more and more features over time. I have been using it for a little while now and am just loving it.
Once you deactivate the Google Photos app, the Google Camera app won’t display any pictures you take when clicking on the small preview, even if you have another gallery app installed. I switched to using the Stingle camera app that comes bundled with their photo app. It immediately encrypts and uploads your images to Stingle.
Maps
Google Maps has a huge track record of surveillance and privacy violation, as you can see here. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, I made the jaw dropping discovery that in the Street View early days, Google was intentionally collecting “emails, passwords and other private information from wifi networks in more than 30 countries” while roaming the streets (source). The replacement I chose for maps is Openstreetmap, which can be accessed through the OSMand Android application on mobile. It doesn’t have all the many feature the Google app has, so it’s not that much of a replacement, but I’m hoping it will be enough. It’s worth noting that if you’re on an IPhone, Apple Maps is also a pretty good application in terms of privacy and tracking.
2 Factor Authenticator
I switched from Google Authenticator to Lastpass Authenticator, since I use LastPass as my password manager.
SMS
Google defaults to its Messages app on Android but there are many others you can use. I use Signal as my messaging app so it made sense for me to also use it for SMS, which is possible on Android.
Domains
I switched my domain registrar from Google Domains to Namecheap, after researching alternatives. Namecheap offers free Whois privacy protection forever so your private information will not be directly linked to your domain (that’s very helpful to avoid spams).
Smartwatch
I found out Google had bought Fitbit and thought of finding other smart watches but I ended up going back to basics and getting a “dumb” watch. It gives me the time of day and doesn’t track my heart, activity or every move. It’s actually been very freeing to not be controlled and constantly analyzed by a device. I was a big fan of Pebble watches. Their approach was very different from what smart watches have become under surveillance capitalism. Pebbles made you in control of your data, allowed anyone to develop apps for the watch and had a very different goal in mind. Today Google intends to collect every possible data on us, from our faces to our literal body and hearts. So I’ll stick to one that I read instead of one that reads me.
I was also using the SwiftKey keyboard which now is owned by Microsoft so I switched to using Flesky Keyboard instead.
These are the apps I have switched to so far, making me mostly Google free, although on an Android phone it’s impossible to completely escape it. Some people choose IPhones for this reason, since Apple is much more respectful of users’ privacy than Google. I already sleep better knowing I regained control over some of my data and I will continue to strive towards even more. As an additional privacy enhancing tool, I use a VPN so my online traffic is hidden from my internet service provider (ISPs are not satisfied overcharging you for internet, now they also track your every move and sell the data to third parties). I also use a great tool for Android called Adguard that blocks ads and most importantly trackers in every app, not just my browser.
The surveillance capitalistic model is not limited to the tech giants and has made its way into all industries. So extracting ourselves from Google is only the start of a journey we need to make together, to regain control of our data and our democracies if we don’t want them to disappear. Real change will only come through regulation and laws to protect us, just like we did during the industrial capitalistic era. We can follow in their footsteps to bring humanity back into tech.
Edit August 25th 2022: After a year a a half I’m still very happy with my choices. The only app I haven’t been able to get rid of is Google maps, because it does so much that I find I still need it more often than I’d like. I’ve also been following the development of Skiff for more than a year and they’ve created a really great alternative to Google docs. Their interface is gorgeous and you can share documents with edit capabilities easily. I’m thinking of replacing Standard Notes with Skiff. They’ve also just released an email app so I’m hoping a calendar will follow. I love that more companies are taking creating private and/or encrypted alternatives to the Google suite!
